An Examination of Wasted Potential in Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, Madame de Stael’s Corinne, Or Italy, Austen’s Mansfield Park and Hemans’ “Properzia Rossi”
What is this thing called wasted potential? Why do authors develop characters that fail to live up to their full potential? Wasted potentialis one of the themes that emerged in the writings of women authors during the 19th century. With this in mind, in this presentation I will examine these two questions as a point of entry and then I will discuss characters who exhibited characteristics of wasted potential from four 19th century women authors: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), Madame de Stael’s Corinne, Or Italy (1807), Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (2003) and Felicia Hemans’ “Properzia Rossi” (1999). Their works share a recurring theme of wasted potential that is often overlooked by the reader. Some of the characters’ lives were wasted for various reasons; some were murdered, abandoned, alienated. Others just simply didn’t fulfil their full potential.To illustrate my purpose, I will read selected vignettes of each text to illustrate the theme of wasted potential.
Four Paragraphs
Shelley’s secret creation of the Monster is the catalyst for the display of wasted potential throughout the novel. Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist, for example, abandons his family when he goes to school in Ingolstadt, thereby wasting the potential of nurturing and maintaining familial relations. He is consumed with the idea of creating scientific knowledge, or to play God. “I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit” (81), explains Victor. Because he is consumed with the idea of creating an inanimate object, he loses out on opportunities of potentially becoming a real scholar, making contributions to uplift mankind. After creating the Monster, it is so grotesque and far removed from what Victor perceives that it would be, Victor could not look at it. He explains, “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room . . . .” (84). Victor considered his two years of work a failure. Not only has he wasted his potential as a scientist, but also as a creator or as “God.”
Disappointed that he has wasted his potential, he withdraws from society as he so often does when faced with disappointments. Therefore, from a psychological standpoint, Victor perhaps experiences a nervous breakdown. Victor tells Clerval, “Do not ask me,” cried I [Victor], putting my hands before my eyes, for I thought I saw the dreaded spectre glide into the room; “he can tell.—Oh, save me! Save me!” I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously, and fell down in a fit” (87). In addition to Victor’s psychological state of being, he recognizes that his obsession with creating the Monster had “. . . secluded me [him] from the intercourse of my [his] fellow-creatures, and rendered me [him] unsocial. . . .” (94).
Victor’s creation of the Monster made it an outcast from its conception. Victor explains,
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe . . . . His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. —Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness, but these luxuriances only formed a more same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black libs (83)
According to D. W. Winnicott ‘s “Establishment of Relationship with External Reality,” the role of the mother is important for the healthy development of a child. The first stage of Winnicott’s theory states that the child or newborn needs to feel connected. In Frankenstein, the Monster is created in the absence of a mother; therefore, it is unable to receive such nurturing as Winnicott suggests. Having been born motherless, the Monster’s rhetoric is most poignant in that it clearly personifies its wasted potential.
“. . . . All men hate the wretched; how then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of use.” (118)
In Denise Gigante’s “Facing the Ugly: The Case of ‘Frankenstein,’” she argues that “the repressed ugliness at the heart of an elaborate symbolic network that threatened the moment on the scene . . . .” (567). Because the Monster’s body wrestles with itself from the inside outward, Gigante sees this as a figure of excess. She argues that from a creative stance, “Frankenstein’s Monster is only too real. He is, like the blood and guts oozing from the fissures in his skin, an excess of existence, exceeding representation, and hence appearing to others as a chaotic spillage from his representational shell” (566). Here, Gigante focuses only on the physical attributes, the outward appearance of the Monster.
An Examination of Wasted Potential in Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, Madame de Stael’s Corinne, Or Italy, Austen’s Mansfield Park and Hemans’ “Properzia Rossi”
What is this thing called wasted potential? Why do authors develop characters that fail to live up to their full potential? Wasted potentialis one of the themes that emerged in the writings of women authors during the 19th century. With this in mind, in this presentation I will examine these two questions as a point of entry and then I will discuss characters who exhibited characteristics of wasted potential from four 19th century women authors: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), Madame de Stael’s Corinne, Or Italy (1807), Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (2003) and Felicia Hemans’ “Properzia Rossi” (1999). Their works share a recurring theme of wasted potential that is often overlooked by the reader. Some of the characters’ lives were wasted for various reasons; some were murdered, abandoned, alienated. Others just simply didn’t fulfil their full potential.To illustrate my purpose, I will read selected vignettes of each text to illustrate the theme of wasted potential.
Four Paragraphs
Shelley’s secret creation of the Monster is the catalyst for the display of wasted potential throughout the novel. Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist, for example, abandons his family when he goes to school in Ingolstadt, thereby wasting the potential of nurturing and maintaining familial relations. He is consumed with the idea of creating scientific knowledge, or to play God. “I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit” (81), explains Victor. Because he is consumed with the idea of creating an inanimate object, he loses out on opportunities of potentially becoming a real scholar, making contributions to uplift mankind. After creating the Monster, it is so grotesque and far removed from what Victor perceives that it would be, Victor could not look at it. He explains, “I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room . . . .” (84). Victor considered his two years of work a failure. Not only has he wasted his potential as a scientist, but also as a creator or as “God.”
Disappointed that he has wasted his potential, he withdraws from society as he so often does when faced with disappointments. Therefore, from a psychological standpoint, Victor perhaps experiences a nervous breakdown. Victor tells Clerval, “Do not ask me,” cried I [Victor], putting my hands before my eyes, for I thought I saw the dreaded spectre glide into the room; “he can tell.—Oh, save me! Save me!” I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously, and fell down in a fit” (87). In addition to Victor’s psychological state of being, he recognizes that his obsession with creating the Monster had “. . . secluded me [him] from the intercourse of my [his] fellow-creatures, and rendered me [him] unsocial. . . .” (94).
Victor’s creation of the Monster made it an outcast from its conception. Victor explains,
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe . . . . His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. —Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness, but these luxuriances only formed a more same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion, and straight black libs (83)
According to D. W. Winnicott ‘s “Establishment of Relationship with External Reality,” the role of the mother is important for the healthy development of a child. The first stage of Winnicott’s theory states that the child or newborn needs to feel connected. In Frankenstein, the Monster is created in the absence of a mother; therefore, it is unable to receive such nurturing as Winnicott suggests. Having been born motherless, the Monster’s rhetoric is most poignant in that it clearly personifies its wasted potential.
“. . . . All men hate the wretched; how then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of use.” (118)
In Denise Gigante’s “Facing the Ugly: The Case of ‘Frankenstein,’” she argues that “the repressed ugliness at the heart of an elaborate symbolic network that threatened the moment on the scene . . . .” (567). Because the Monster’s body wrestles with itself from the inside outward, Gigante sees this as a figure of excess. She argues that from a creative stance, “Frankenstein’s Monster is only too real. He is, like the blood and guts oozing from the fissures in his skin, an excess of existence, exceeding representation, and hence appearing to others as a chaotic spillage from his representational shell” (566). Here, Gigante focuses only on the physical attributes, the outward appearance of the Monster.